Topic: WorldNetDaily
It wouldn't be Joseph Farah if he wasn't playing the victim and engaging in baseless conspiracy-mongering, and that's what Farah does in his Oct. 11 column:
Here we go again.
I've been through this nightmare before.
Any day now, you can expect to begin hearing that dozens of groups and individuals critical of Barack Obama and his policies have been subjected to Internal Revenue Service audits.
That's the way it happened during the last Democratic presidential administration. And this one is, if anything, more desperate, more ruthless and more cunning that the one run by Bill Clinton.
The evidence for my prediction is this: Administration officials, political appointees, are already accessing confidential tax information on Obama's critics.
In a late August conference call with reporters, Austan Goolsbee, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, let it slip that he knew more than he should about the tax structure of Koch Industries, one of the primary funders of tea-party activity, including Dick Armey's FreedomWorks.
As a result, the treasury inspector general for tax administration plans to review what Goolsbee knew and how he knew it.
With a Republican midterm election landslide in the making, Democratic lawmakers are already demanding the IRS crack down on those paying for ads attacking them.
This is the way it starts.
I know because I've been there.
Farah has let his darkly vivid imagination run away with him yet again. In fact, Goolsbee did not "know more than he should about the tax structure of Koch Industries"; as Politico notes, all the information about Koch's tax structure was taken from publicly available sources, including Koch's own website.
Nevertheless, this gives Farah an opportunity to play his victim card and whine yet again how his Western Journalism Center was the subject of an IRS audit in the 1990s, just like "Every group and individual that made it onto Bill Clinton's radar screen by being critical of his administration." To do so, of course, Farah has to ignore the fact that, as we noted, a joint congressional committee in 2000 found no credible evidence that the IRS was biased against anti-Clinton groups.
Farah then asserted: "Obama is a true disciple of Saul Alinsky, and he won't hesitate to use quasi-legal and extra-legal means to go after his enemies. Apparently he's already begun putting together the enemies list."
Farah really wishes there was an Obama enemies list, and that he was on it -- that way he could sell more birther crap.
